


And You're Still My Chosen One

by Duck_Life



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Childhood Memories, Gen, Happy With A Sad Middle With A Happy Ending, Verbal Child Abuse (By Snoke)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 23:53:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5890000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben grows up and away. One day he comes back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And You're Still My Chosen One

I.

Leia cooks about once a week, always a treat, often old recipes from Alderaan. Occasionally she’ll try something brand new, experimenting. She doesn’t cook that often but she’s excellent when she does.

Her four-year-old son disagrees.

“I don’t want that,” he tells her plaintively, glaring at something green he’s shoved around on his plate. “I don’t want that. It’s yucky.”

“Did you try it?” she says, amused but stern, watching him over her lifted fork. Across the table, Han watches them, expecting quite the performance. He never met anyone as stubborn as Leia Organa until his son was born.

“No.”

“Then how do you know that it’s yucky?” It’s obvious she used to be a senator.

“I just know,” he pouts, and shoves away from the table, hopping down.

His parents stand up to go after him. “Ben, you need to finish your dinner.”

“I don’t _want_ it.”

“I didn’t ask you if you wanted it.”

“I don’t want it!” he yells, stamping his little foot and balling up his little fists and screwing up his little face in frustration. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”

Han and Leia meet each other’s eyes from across the kitchen. “Oh, no!” Leia says, dramatic as she can. “There’s a monster in the living room!”

“What?!” he gasps. “Where?”

“There!” she cries, pointing to Ben, who’s stopped storming off to watch them. “Oh, what are we going to do?”

“What kind of monster is it?”

“It’s… oh _no_. Honey, it’s a grumparumpasaurus.”

“I’ll get him!” Han shouts, and scoops up his protesting son before pinning him playfully to the floor. “I got him!”

“My hero!” she laughs, joining her family on the floor and attacking her son’s pale belly with her fingers. “The only way to stop a grumparumpasaurus is tickling.”

Little Ben screams with laughter as his parents attack, tickling his sides. His dad blows a raspberry on his stomach. Whatever worries he had about the vegetables on his plate fly from his mind.

II.

“You be the monster,” Poe says, waving around his foam sword, “and I’ll be the knight.”

“How come I always have to be the monster?” Ben frowns, scuffing his shoe on the hard asphalt. He knows why. He knows it’s because he’s younger than Poe and when they play, Poe always gets his way. He wants to hear what his best friend is going to say, though.

“Because you’re taller,” Poe shrugs. He’s the shortest in his class and despite his age, Ben has a few inches on him. “Everyone knows that monsters are tall.”

“Fine,” he says, scowling.

“So what kind of monster are you gonna be?” Poe says, shaking his wild curls out of his eyes. “A wampa? A rancor?”

Ben smiles. “I’m a Snoke.”

“A what?”

“ _You_ don’t know what a _Snoke_ is?” Ben smirks, with all the superiority of a child who knows something that his buddies don’t. “It’s the scariest monster.”

“What’s it look like, then?”

“Like a man, only big and pale, and kinda like his head got shrunk.”

Poe shakes his head, those curls bouncing off his shoulders. “I never heard of that,” he says, pounding his foam sword on the ground like he’s demanding order. “Where did you see a Snoke?”

Ben smiles. “I _dreamed_ it.”

“Then it’s not real!”

“He is _so_ real.”

“Nah-ah.”

They go on arguing like that for a while until their mothers call them to dinner, completely forgetting they meant to play.

III.

“Do you know what makes a person a monster?” Ben is ten years old and on the cusp of sleep. He hears Snoke as if through a ventilation shaft, echoey and distant. “Being around people who believe you are one.”

Sometimes Ben ignores the man in his dreams. Sometimes he talks back. “Nobody thinks I’m a monster,” he whispers into his empty bedroom.

It’s like he can feel Snoke staring him down. “Are you sure?”

That night he has a nightmare, dreams that his father is dead sprawled on the ground, blood pooling around his body, that his uncle is crawling toward him with his legs sliced off, that Chewie’s dead, that Poe’s dead, their bodies broken around him. He looks down at his mother’s tearstained face, further down at the lightsaber through her chest, at his own hand holding the hilt.

Ben jolts awake shaking and runs down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, raises his hand to knock.

And then he stops. And he thinks. He thinks about the way his mother looks when he mentions learning about his grandfather, and he thinks of the whispered conversations between her and Uncle Luke that stop when he steps into a room. He thinks about how his mother will react when he tells her that he dreamt of killing her.

Slowly, slowly, he lowers his hand.

IV.

“You’re a monster,” she spits at him, vicious as the Skywalker saber she brandishes. The snow falls and falls and Kylo Ren stands tall.

“No,” he tells Rey, but he doesn’t know how much he believes it. He just knows he can’t let her escape. He can’t let her best him. Either one. “You need a teacher.”

 _What could you teach her?_ a niggling voice at the back of his mind whispers. Some nights he thinks it used to be Snoke and now it’s just a part of him. _How to murder your family in cold blood? How to lose everything?_

Maybe when he was young he was a Jedi, someone who could learn, who could teach. It seems like ages since then. It seems like ages since he’s slept. It seems like ages since he stood on a bridge and lanced his father through with a lightsaber.

“I can show you the ways of the Force,” he swears, but he doubts himself. He doubts the Force. He doubts everything but his own nature.

V.

Vader never speaks to him.

He knows that Vader speaks frequently with his uncle, and so he wonders all the time what he’s not doing. What loyalty he has not shown. Why he should be less deserving than Luke Skywalker, a traitor to their family name.

Vader never speaks to him, but he speaks to Vader all the time. Kneeling in front of the old twisted mask, confessing his sins, sharing his triumphs. He confides secrets he wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else in that melted hunk of plastic and metal.

And one night, torn between family and war, love and honor and hate and forgiveness, terrified to leave but desperate to run, he kneels in front of his grandfather’s mask.

“I’m a monster,” he whispers, shaking.

VI.

Leia knows the second her son lands on D’Qar. Though she never trained as a Jedi, the Force is strong in her. She can pick up certain inflections in the world around her, know things before they happen.

And besides. A mother always knows.

It’s almost the middle of the night when he touches down, expecting an angry mob, expecting to be crucified. Expecting to deserve it.

He doesn’t expect his mother to be standing on the tarmac watching him jump out of his small ship, watching him walk on solid ground toward her. She says nothing; she greets him with open arms.

Like he can’t help himself, he launches toward her, and if she’s about to shoot him dead he’s okay with it. “I’m sorry,” he says, sobs it into her shoulder as he breaks around her. “I’m so, so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

“ _Shhh_ ,” she tells him, running a hand through his soft hair. She can remember shampooing it, spiking it into crazy shapes in soapy bath water, combing his hair every night and tucking him in and kissing him on the forehead. “It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re home.”

“I’m…” he says softly, ducking his head. He can’t meet her eyes as he pulls away. “This can’t be my home,” he tells her wildly. “I’m not… what I was, who I was. What I did… I can’t be who I was. I’m something else now, I’m… some kind of—”

“You’re my son,” she promises him, and holds him tight. “Oh, my grown-up son.” She pulls away to swipe his hair from his face, laughs a little. “You’re so handsome.”


End file.
